


come to me and kill the night off

by nirav



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Pacific Rim AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 11:14:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7435087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirav/pseuds/nirav
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>or, four times Lucy Lane doesn’t cry, and one time she does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come to me and kill the night off

**Author's Note:**

> written for [smallandsundry](www.smallandsundry.tumblr..com).
> 
> Please Note: I started this a while back and did not realize until coming to post it that [someone else got to the Lucy/Alex Pacific Rim AU thing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7408309?view_full_work=true) first. I promise I'm not trying to rip you off!

* * *

 

Lucy Lane is four years old, and she is crying.

Everything around her is ash and heavy and cold, and the ground is shaking, and the shoes her mother gave her-- they were her sister’s first, until she outgrew them, and then the shiny red leather was passed on to Lucy-- are filthy, the strap on one of them too broken to keep it on her foot.  She holds onto it, stumbling through the streets looking for her parents, her sister, anyone--

All she finds is a monster, the size of a building and with claws the size of cars, and it chases her into an alley, reaching reaching reaching until suddenly it’s yanked away by another one, metallic and robotic.

She ventures out of the alley, shoe still in hand, to see a man-- a real man, a human man-- climbing out of the enormous robot.  He smiles down at her, tired and unafraid, and she stops crying.

By the time she’s been deposited in a room with a bed and he- Stacker, his name is Stacker, and his voice rumbles low and quiet when he speaks to her, his hand continually gentle on her shoulder as they tell her that he’ll be taking care of her now-- falls asleep in a chair, slumped and too-tall, she decides that she’s not going to cry again.

* * *

**One**

She’s twenty years old and Stacker has finally--  _ finally _ \-- allowed her to train with the potential jaeger pilots in the base.  For ten years he’s been training her, early in the mornings and later in the evenings, keeping her abreast of their martial arts and combat classes, the tactics, the mechanics of the jaegers, even as he’s continued to keep her from the program itself as it starts to grow and expand.  

The only thing she’s never done is a simulation.

“Alright, kiddo,” the ops officer says with a wink.  He tugs on the straps in her harness, double checks the headset, the locking mechanisms holding her suit into the cage.  “You good?”

“All good,” Lucy confirms.  Her stomach aches and her whole skeleton hurts under the weight of a suit originally designed for a full-grown man.  She’s seen too many of the pilots early in the program stumble out of the simulations, bleeding from the nose and eyes, some catatonic and some not, as the program has fine-tuned the neural link possibilites.  It’s only been in the last year that they’ve perfected it.  She shouldn’t be in here, too young, too small, but she’s somehow talked her way into it with Stacker and there’s no way she’s backing down now.

The simulation starts, and it’s  _ more _ \-- everything is more, the sounds and smells and visuals pouring into her from every angle, at every volume and every intensity-- and she grits her teeth against it and pushes forward.  

She manages to find her way through the noise, finding her limbs in the suit and pushing forward with one step, and then another, and another.  She towers over buildings and highways, immense and powerful and--

The kaiju appears (Category 3, dark green and four-legged; she rattles through the science in a flash) and she pushes after it, fists the size of freighters curled and ready.

It’s not like fighting another trainee in the gym, where there are bounds and rules and limitations.  She’s thrown through a series of buildings and lands four blocks away and reaches into a construction site to pick up a crane and swing it like a baseball bat at the kaiju.  There are tiny simulated people running past her, putting her between them and the kaiju, and she moves forward, away from them, towards the kaiju.

Alarms go off, in the simulation or in reality; she can’t tell, so she keeps going, reaching for weapons and struggling against the kaiju until suddenly, abruptly, there’s a crack from inside the machine and pain blooms in her right arm.

The simulation flickers and dies and she’s still in pain, biting back a scream because the crack she’d heard was her wrist breaking.  Stacker barrels into the room, the ops officer stumbling in behind him, and tears at the suit to pull her free.  It jars her arm and she cries out, short and sharp before clamping down on it.  Her eyes water and she holds them open wide, refusing to cry during her first--

“Get a doctor in here, now,” Stacker shouts at the ops officer, practically throwing him through the door, as if he was the one who broke her arm.  He turns back to Lucy, helping her carefully out of the cage and down to sit on the floor, pulling off his uniform jacket and bundling it carefully under her arm.  “Are you okay?”

“Awesome,” Lucy gasps out.  “Did I beat it?”

“Your arm is--”

“Just a scratch,” she says, forcing a smile up at him.  She wants to cry, wants to curl around her broken arm and cry until it doesn’t hurt anymore, but she sets her jaw and hones in on Stacker’s hand on her shoulder, warm and heavy and familiar.  “How’d I do?”

He hums quietly, not answering, and paces at her side until the doctor shows up.

Later that evening, she hacks into the ops officer’s system from her quarters and finds her stats. 

One drop, one kill.

* * *

**Two**

Stacker moves to Alaska, and Lucy stays in Hong Kong.  He comes back, two years later, with a heavier set to his jaw, rounder shoulders, a broken woman in a medical transport.

Her name is Kara, and she was a pilot.  Now, she’s restricted to a wheelchair, her spine mangled, but she still smiles at everyone and pursues Lucy’s friendship relentlessly.  Not that it’s hard, being friends with Kara; it would be easy even if they weren’t some of the only women under the age of 35 on the base, because Kara is sunlight personified even in the middle of a war they don’t know how to win.

Lucy goes to Kara’s quarters one night, late, after her latest simulation (32 drops, 32 kills), with a new tea someone brought to Stacker, and pops in without knocking to find Kara crying.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Kara says, quiet and quick, wiping at her eyes and pushing a smile across her face.

“Sure you are,” Lucy says slowly.  She pulls the door shut behind her and sits on Kara’s bed, offering her the tea.  “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, really,” Kara says with a sniff. She takes a careful sip of the tea and burns her tongue anyways, wincing and drinking more.  “I just miss my family, you know?”

Lucy looks down at her knees, gripping at the material of her pants, and nods.  “Yeah, I get it.”

“I wish my sister was here, is all.”

“You have a sister?”  Lucy could have sworn Kara had said her family died in a jaeger attack in Seattle--

“Adoptive, technically,” Kara says with a shrug.  “But in all the ways that count, she’s my family.”

“Oh,” Lucy says.  “Where is she?”

“Who knows,” Kara says with a sigh.  “After this--” she gestures to her legs, her wheelchair, the neverending testament to her last moments in a jaeger-- “She disappeared.  She blames herself, I think.”

“Your sister was your copilot?”

“Yeah,” Kara says quietly. “Alex.”

“Oh,” Lucy says again.  She accepts the tea from Kara and takes a sip.  It’s still too hot.  When Stacker came home with Kara, broken and and barely able to sit up on her own, the whole base had buzzed quietly around the dead silence of her medical bay, talking about her shattered spine and ruined jaeger and the copilot who kept it together long enough to take a kaiju down alone before the whole thing, broken jaeger and broken pilot, collapsed on the Alaskan shoreline.

“My family was killed.  In the first attack in Manila.  I was four.”

“Oh,” Kara echoes, sad and earnest.  “I didn’t know-- I’m so sorry.” 

Lucy shakes her head.  She’s heard more apologies for her loss than she ever wanted to, ignored more sympathetic glances and unintelligible mumbles in her directions than she should have had to.   

“It’s a war, right?”  Her throat hurts, maybe from the hot tea but probably from thinking about her mother, her father, her sister, the bodies that Stacker never allowed her to see.  Closed caskets for a mass grave parading as a memorial to those lost in the attack.  

She clears her throat and squares her shoulders.  Kara’s hand is on her knee-- who knows when that happened-- and she’s talking at Lucy, comfort and sympathy keeping her voice warm and light.

Lucy listens.  The platitudes don’t fall as flat as they have in the past, and her throat aches, and she holds onto Kara’s hand and swallows against the way her shoulders want to bow, the way she wants to curl up at Kara’s side and cry and be told that everything will be okay.

Instead, she stays upright and dry-eyed, and lets Kara talk until the too-hot tea has gone cold and they’re both ready to smile again.

****

* * *

 

**Three**

Stacker leaves early one morning and comes back the next day in a helicopter with a legend at his side.

Legend, or disgrace, depending on who you talk to.  Or if you’re talking to Stacker and he’s in a good mood or a bad one.

Alex Danvers is shorter than she expected, and she looks nothing like Kara-- Kara, who looks short in her wheelchair but somehow still sits taller than Lucy has ever stood, who’s been working with Lucy for months on repairing the old jaeger for just this plan-- and walks with bowed shoulders that clash against her perfectly balanced steps, seemingly unfazed by the pouring rain drenching her hair and clothes.

“Danvers,” Stacker rumbles out.  “This is Lucy Lane, one of our best.  She’s vetted all of your potential drift partners.”

Lucy hands them each an umbrella, one eyebrow raised.  “Not what I was expecting,” she mumbles in Japanese to Stacker, and one corner of his mouth twitches.

“What were you expecting?” Alex says with a smirk of her own, in functional but uncertain Japanese.  Lucy clears her throat and lifts her chin, refusing to wilt under Alex Danvers’ sharp eyes.  

“Let’s go,” Stacker says, a hand on her shoulder and a sharp look shot over to Alex, and hurries them into the bay.  The door has barely closed behind them and Alex is staring up at the high ceilings and busy hustle of the jaeger bay when there’s a shout and Kara speeds up to them, wheelchair skidding to a stop on the wet concrete.

“Alex!”  She beams up from her chair, smile wide and eyes bright, and grabs at Alex’s hands, pulling her into a hug.

“Kara,” Alex mumbles, the sound of her voice lost in the rumble of the jaeger bay, and she awkwardly drops down onto her knees, forehead burrowed in Kara’s shoulder and fingers digging into her back.  Her jacket catches on one of the wheels and she inhales, sharp and choked and loud enough to make Lucy’s teeth hurt even in the overcrowded hangar.  

Stacker clears his throat, jaw tight, and Alex mutters an audible “ _ Fuck off _ ” without loosening her hold on Kara.  Lucy’s eyes go wide for a moment, mouth opening to offer a rebuke for the insubordination, but Kara is crying and holding onto her sister, and Lucy’s throat tightens around the words before she can speak.

Stacker mutters at her to bring them along later once they’re done with their melodrama because there’s a war to win, thank you very much, and marches off.  Lucy stands, alone and uncertain, hands clasped behind her back.

“Come on, I want to show you something,” Kara says suddenly, pulling back from Alex.  She grins and wheels off, speeding through the bay and waving to people as she goes, and Alex chases after her, leaving Lucy five steps behind and chasing after them both.

“Oh.”  Alex skids to a stop behind Kara, staring up at the jaeger in front of them.  

“We completely rebuilt her,” Kara says with a broad smile.  “She’s as good as new.”

“Better than, actually,” Lucy offers.  “We added a few bells and whistles.”

Alex says nothing and grips at Kara’s shoulder, knuckles white and mouth pulled tight as she stares up at the jaeger she carried to shore alone.

Kara’s radio whistles at her, Tendo’s voice crackling over the radio, and she hugs Alex, short and hard, before heading off and leaving them alone.  Lucy takes a deep breath, looking for something to say, and Alex just stares at Hyperion.

“She’s incredible,” Alex mumbles.

“Yeah,” Lucy says, glancing up at the jaeger.  “A bit old school, we couldn’t retrofit her for the new digital--”

“Not the jaeger,” Alex says sharply.  “Kara.”

“Oh.”

“I let her-- I let that happen to her, and she’s still--” Alex cuts herself off, biting the sentence off halfway through and swiping at her tears.  She looks up at Hyperion, eyes shining and hands trembling, and Lucy swallows around the way her chest aches because Alex looks a jaeger the way Lucy’s never been able to: like home, like family, like quiet comfort.

Lucy clears her throat again, once and then once more to push past the tightness in her throat, and squares her shoulders.  “We need to go see the Marshal and get you briefed.”

* * *

 

**Four**

After the Chen triplets and the Kaidanovskys are lost, after Stryker is left useless and Herc Hansen is almost killed, after Lucy and Alex were let into the fight on Kara’s sharp pleading, Stacker makes his choice, and Lucy goes to say goodbye.

“You’re not going to change my mind,” he says, not turning around from the window in his office as she shuts the door.

“I know.”  Lucy stands, feet carefully together and hands linked behind her, waiting until he turns to face her.  “That doesn’t meant I don’t have something to say, though.”

“Lucy,” he starts, only to sigh and lean against his desk, gesturing for her to speak.

“I understand and respect your decision,” Lucy says, shoulders square and chin up.  “I think it’s idiotic, but I respect it.”

“I’m dying, Lucy.”

“I’m aware.”

“What would you have me do?”

“Marshall, I can recognize that there’s no other option and still be angry that I’m going to watch the only family I have left die  _ again _ for this war.”  Her voice cracks halfway through and her posture finally wavers, and Stacker reaches out, momentary and hesitant, for her.  He’s never been tactile with her, not when she was four years old and not in the twenty years since then, and her stomach rolls at the break in character, brief and unfinished as it is.

“Lucy,” he says, and his voice is soft, careful, as it was when he spoke to her at age five, long before he carried the weight of the entire jaeger program on his back.  “This is a war, and we have to win it.  I’m doing this for you as much as I am for anyone else.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?  That you’re going to throw yourself into the drift with some uselessly privileged moron--”

“He’s two years older than you,” Stacker says mildly.

“And you’re my father,” Lucy half-shouts.  It catches in her throat, broken and jagged, and her whole body-- muscles still aching from the fight, skull tender and ears ringing from the drift-- shakes under the effort.

“Lucy,” he says, quiet and soft and gentle like he did when she was still five years old and curled up at the foot of his bed after a nightmare.  “You know the prognosis isn’t good.  I’m a  _ pilot _ , and I’d rather--”

“Yeah, well, I’d rather not have to find another family again,” Lucy snaps.  

“Haven’t you already?” He smiles down at her, hands on her shoulders, even as he fights against it.  “Danvers, the both of them.  Even the annoying one.”

“It’s not fair,” Lucy says.

“It’s not,” he echoes.  “But it’s war, and now it’s a war we can end.”

“I have to go,” Lucy rushes out, pulling free from his hands and half-stumbling back towards the door. Her throat burns and her chest aches, even her teeth hurt now, and she shoves her way out of the door even as he yells after her.  Normally, she would snap to attention, respect straightening her shoulders, but Stacker is going to sacrifice himself and they may all die and she still has echoes of Alex Danvers ebbing and flowing in her head, soft blue edges and quiet sadness filling in all the jagged edges that make up Lucy Lane and--

\--she collides with Alex in the hallway outside their rooms.

“Whoa-- hey, are you okay?”  Alex’s hands grip at her shoulders, narrower and firmer than Stacker’s, warm and strong and a presence that slots neatly in over the pieces of Alex that have rounded out the pieces of Lucy in the past hours, eyes narrowed and mouth set in a sharp line.  Lucy half-stumbles, half-lunges forward, fists yanking at Alex’s shirt, and kisses her, short and sharp with ragged breath in contrast to Alex’s obnoxiously unflappable calm.

“I don’t think now is really the best time--”

“We’re all probably going to die tomorrow, Alex,” Lucy says, clearing her throat loudly and blinking against the burn in her eyes.

“Okay,” Alex mumbles.  Her eyes are almost as dark as Lucy’s and her hands move to curl around the back of Lucy’s neck.  “Okay.”

* * *

 

**Five**

Lucy wakes up in the middle of the ocean, alone and with an empty head and no drift and no jaeger and no Alex.  There’s only miles of water, peaceful and unaffected by the battle miles below, and her chest aches like someone hit her with a truck.  She scrambles to her feet, almost falling over twice in the narrow space of the escape pod, her head reeling and empty without Alex, a brutal void where Alex had been and had been yanked away, and Lucy’s panic rises and rises and rises until, suddenly, Alex’s pod appears and Lucy leaps into the ocean without a moment of hesitation.  

The suit is heavy, too heavy, too bulky, the saltwater grinding in the joints, but she swims anyways.  It takes forever, days and days and days of panic and floundering, to swim the short distance and scramble up onto the pod.  Her hands shake, damaged knuckles stinging from the saltwater, as she yanks at the lever and Alex isn’t  _ breathing _ and her heart isn’t beating and there’s no life in her body at all.  They saved the world but Lucy’s world doesn’t exist beyond a lifeless body in her arms and what’s the point of living with a hole in every part of her, when she’ll always have echoes of Alex Danvers burrowed into her bones and--

“You’re squeezing me too tight.”

It’s quiet, too quiet and almost lost in the sounds of the ocean and Lucy trying to breathe through the fact that  _ Alex is dead _ .  Except she’s not, and she finally moves, finally puts her arms around Lucy, finally sits up and opens her eyes and smiles at Lucy even though her breath comes heavy and pained and she looks ready to sleep for a month.  Lucy stares at her, throat tight and eyes wide, and Alex drops her forehead against Lucy’s and Lucy Lane, for the first time since she was four years old, cries.


End file.
